[JAVA3D] animating person in real time

[Evan Drumwright]

Hi,   I'm a computer science graduate student who is in over his head when it comes to 3D graphics programming.  Please help and sorry for the length!   I am required to animate a person in real time.  This person, which can look very simple (no curves req'd, very blocky) must be able to rotate its head 90 degrees, talk, move its arm, and blink its eyes simultaneously.  The actions do not have to be complicated either- for example, I have determined that only four mouth positions are required to give a decent appearance of talking.   I am worried that this will not be computationally feasible on our machine, a 500 MHz PC with a generic 3D graphics accelerator.  One other hitch as well- we  also must use speech synthesis simultaneously, which I am guessing will eat around 10-15% of the processor.   So, my questions:   1) Can Java 3D perform this in real time?   2) If it can, what would be the best way to animate a talking mouth for example?  I can load this 3D person in and change out mouth positions (we have tested this in 2D and it is not distracting) by exchanging mouths or exchanging textures.  Any other suggestions?   3) If Java 3D is not feasible, what is?  I am restricted to Java but other than that I have my choices open (including 2D representations if possible).   Thanks! Evan Drumwright